The age of personal air monitoring is at hand

The prize-winning pollution sensor developed by a Massachusetts company
detects all but the smallest particles, taking 1,200 readings each second.

The prize-winning pollution sensor developed by a Massachusetts...

Imagine a clip-on tech device that could actually tell you how much pollution you're huffing on your morning ride to work. Imagine you could watch the levels drop - 65, 50, 35 - the air getting better as you turn in to a leafy parking lot on a side street.

It can now be done.

A Massachusetts company, Conscious Clothing, has won a $100,000 competition sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a next-generation personal air monitor.

The one created by Conscious Clothing is about the size of a cellphone, smooth and flat on one side so it can rest against your skin. An engineered elastic ribbon wraps around your chest, and can calculate its own stretch and contraction as you breathe. It calibrates to your body when you put it on.

And it measures small particle pollutants in the air 1,200 times per second, while also gauging some of your body's response.

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"I'm very impressed," says Bill Ameredes, associate professor of medicine and director of the Environmental Exposure and Inhalation Health Facility at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, after his first look at the device.

With particulate measurements 1,200 times per second, "the accuracy of the data should be quite good" offering the possibility of a "previously unattainable" picture of exposure in real time, Ameredes said.

Overall, air quality has been improving in the United States over the last few decades, including in the Houston area, but it still negatively affects the health of millions of Americans. Scientists are looking at how very small particles may trigger not only breathing problems, but cardiovascular problems, including heart attacks.

Conscious Clothing is a collaboration of David Kuller, of the company AUX, Gabrielle Savage Dockterman of Angel Devil Productions, and Dot Kelly of Shearwater Design.

The federal competition they won is part of a larger effort by federal scientists to use off-the-shelf, inexpensive technology to gather and transmit real-time pollution data and marry that to a much more inclusive picture of peoples' exposures to it, said David Balshaw, program director at the Center for Risk and Integrated Sciences at the National Institutes of Health.

Personal exposure

One thing they hoped to accomplish was to "look at the individual, as opposed to the region, as they move in space and time. So you are getting a great resolution of what is happening with an individual's exposure," Balshaw said.

No technology is perfect, and the Conscious Clothing doesn't distinguish the very smallest particles, called ultrafines, that some scientists suspect of causing previously unknown havoc in the body.

On the upside, the parts that make up the new sensor may be had for about $100. Within the confines of current technology, a comparable wearable system capable of measuring ultrafines would cost two hundred times as much, Balshaw said.

Particles can be more dangerous for human health than ozone, and Houston's network of air monitors is considered inadequate for measuring them. Scientists at Rice and Baylor universities are actively carrying out research to figure out where more monitors would be most effective.

Elizabeth Hendler, a consultant who worked for seven years on Houston's ongoing plan for addressing its serious air pollution, said she commends the winners of the competition for creating a very portable, comfortable sensor technology.

"Ten years ago," she said, "the sensors that were available were big, clunky, and required battery packs."

Craig Beskid, president of Houston Regional Monitoring, a privately owned and funded system of air pollution monitors, also applauded the winners, saying personal monitoring technologies are a supplement to ambient monitors.

The new sensor is not available commercially.

Ultimately, the hope is that similar devices will allow people to identify early signs of their own disease.

Also, with GPS technology, numbers of people could feed air data to a network, and a simple smartphone app could then allow someone with asthma or other sensitivities to check conditions and steer clear of the wrong places.